Singing Bowls, Mosaics and Einstein
Tibetan singing bowl and wooden puja stick
Yesterday morning I was making my way around my home slowly watering plants when my eyes settled on my dusty Tibetan singing bowl. Clearly I had not used it for some time and I could feel an urge to sit with it that morning. I took it to the kitchen and carefully washed the weighted bronze bowl, admiring all the imperfections and the beautiful shape of it. I gathered myself on my cushion in the living room and held it in my hands. The invitation was there, settling into my body, eager to play the bowl.
The sound of these bowls is so unique and when the wooden puja stick is run around the edge it resonates with sound from the echoes of the vibrations inside the bowl. This sound blooms in waves of vibration and slowly recedes back to a place of stillness. Those vibrations washed over me in a forgotten familiar calm. A stillness felt in the whole body. I was so happy to be reacquainted with this visceral experience. I sat for some time connecting the gentle wooden stick with the hard bronze surface in different ways - sometimes running it around the top, around the outer edge and tapping to release the 'bong' sound.
My ears were tuned to the waves of sound and the various ways to intensify or lower the pitch depending on the speed of the stick. What was going through my thoughts was that all these vibrations were having a direct impact on my body and state of mind. Amazing!
This reminded me of a comment a physicist once said to me, "Artists deal in resonance." That comment has stuck with me and it continues to spark new ways of approaching my practice. Mosaics, for me, are about resonance. Each tessera on its own does not have much to say until it is placed in relation to another piece. And not all pieces dance well with one another. The artist works as a kind of tuning fork, feeling for which piece harmonizes well with those placed around it. More pieces placed side by side creates a kind of chord. And an entire mosaic, depending on the scale, could be seen - or felt - as a symphony!
Detail of mosaic by Theo
As I step back and contemplate all these ideas, roll them about my thoughts, I realize that the moment of activation in each instance occurs because it has come into contact with something else. The relationship is the ignitor and in isolation each entity has no revealing properties. This is when the leap from mosaic to physics is made. The thought that our reality is simply the biggest mosaic of all. A weaving of atoms, molecules and energy. And it is energy that I, a mosaic artist, feel most acutely - not just the visual. Moving from the micro to the macro and imagining the Universal mosaic on a cosmic level and swinging back again to the granular. It was Einstein who said nothing has fixed properties in isolation, only in relationship to everything else. And Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, who takes it deeper by showing us that even space itself is granular, woven like a mosaic at its core.
Albert Einstein
Then the shift to relationships, resonance and the connections between people. Some are felt with ease and joy while others might be experienced with repulsion. We are the tesserae of a human mosaic. The resonance between characters is evident in all our histories, stories and myths. Some pieces dance better together than others, depending on their compatibility. And some might say that compatibility is a direct result of aligned frequencies. Every aspect I touched on this morning can be broken down into individual entities either drawn together to make a whole or forced apart to find other, better suited connections. We've all had encounters with a person we immediately felt drawn to as well as a person we intuitively chose to walk away from.
Elaine, Theodora and Peter
No matter how big or how small, I envision the patterns occurring, allowing me to see the fractals. The same principle operating at every scale - quantum, artistic, human, and cosmic. This is also what the ancient Hermetic principle describes in the phrase As Above, So Below. A mystical tradition that arrived at the same truth but from an opposite origin than Einstein, hundreds of years before. Everything is governed by unseen principles, things we often miss in our day to day lives. And if we take the time to listen to the singing bowls, we may just catch a glimpse of the greater Universe.
